Most developer tools companies should not start with a paid AI visibility platform. Run the free layer first. Buy a monthly tracker only if someone will check it weekly. Pay $599 per month only when the plan bundles content you would buy anyway. If you only want to know how AI engines describe your product, a one-time diagnosis fits better.

That last sentence is also a disclosure. CiteGap sells one-time diagnoses, not subscriptions. The bias cuts both ways: no monthly plan to upsell, and an obvious interest in calling subscriptions unnecessary when they are not. Every entry below says who should buy it and who should skip it. Each price links to the vendor page it was checked against on October 21, 2026.

The shortlist at a glance

The market splits into five tiers: free checkers, budget trackers, devtools specialists at $99 to $599, enterprise platforms, and one vendor selling one-time engagements.

Tool Entry price Buy it if Skip it if
Amplitude AI Visibility Free report Want a first look today Need Perplexity, Gemini, or history
Otterly.AI $29/mo Cheapest credible tracker Over 15 prompts; Gemini/Claude are add-ons
Promptmonitor $29/mo Broad model coverage cheap Need daily refresh on entry tier
Peec AI $95/mo Team acts on data weekly Set-and-forget; caps bite fast
Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit $99/mo Already a Semrush customer Standalone buyers; no trial
Ahrefs Brand Radar Free with Ahrefs plans Already run Ahrefs Low search volume brand
AthenaHQ $295/mo Content capacity in-house Lean team; credits burn fast
DevTune $99/mo Sell to developers Not developer-facing
GrackerAI $99/mo Want monitoring plus content Measurement only
Gauge $599/mo Outsourcing execution anyway Dashboard-only buyers
Profound Free trial Scale, SSO, compliance Under ~50 people; run the trial anyway
CiteScore $299 one-time Want a baseline and fix list Need ongoing monitoring

Prices checked October 21, 2026. Annual billing usually saves 15 to 20 percent. AthenaHQ's price is confirmed through third-party reviews rather than its own page.

Tier 0: the free layer

Three free checks answer "what do AI engines currently say about us". A manual prompt test costs nothing and teaches you the most.

Stop here if you are pre-product-market-fit, or if your real question is whether ChatGPT knows you exist. A quarterly snapshot beats a subscription nobody opens after week three.

Tier 1: budget subscriptions, $29 to $99 per month

At this tier you get a fixed prompt set on a schedule, with mention and citation history. Otterly.AI and Promptmonitor are the credible entries; Semrush or Ahrefs only make sense if you already pay them.

Otterly.AI: $29 per month buys 15 prompts tracked daily across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Copilot. Gemini, AI Mode, and Claude are paid add-ons ($9 to $59 per month on Lite). Free trial, no card; Standard is $189 for 100 prompts. 15 prompts fit one brand and not much more.

Promptmonitor wins on model breadth: $29 Starter covers 25 prompts across six models including DeepSeek and Grok, refreshed twice weekly; $39 buys 50 prompts with daily refreshes.

Peec AI starts at $95 per month for 50 prompts and 3 models per Capterra; the vendor page shows numbers only in-app. Pro is $245 for 150 prompts. The recurring complaint at this tier is caps: one SEO interviewed by Mike Sonders called the lower tiers "a flashlight, but I need a floodlight" (LinkedIn).

Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit is $99 per month per domain, billed annually, tracks 25 prompts, has no free trial, and charges $60 per month per 50 extra prompts.

Ahrefs Brand Radar works differently: custom prompt tracking is included with any paid Ahrefs plan (Lite $129/mo, 150 prompt checks), the standalone index starts at $199/mo, and standalone custom prompts at $50/mo for 2,500 checks (pricing guide). The 448M+ prompt index under-covers brands with little search demand, per Ahrefs' own note, which describes most early-stage devtools; use custom prompts instead.

Tier 2: devtools specialists, $99 to $599 per month

Read the inclusions in this tier: at the top you are partly buying articles rather than monitoring.

DevTune is the clearest devtools fit. Plus at $99 tracks 50 buyer questions daily on ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini; Pro at $249 adds Google AI Mode and Copilot; Enterprise starts at $599. Trial is 14 days, no card. Before buying anything on this page, read DevTune's free State of AI Search for Dev Tools: 126,814 citation records, 478 brands, 43 verticals, April to June 2026. DevTune states plainly it is a market benchmark, not a diagnosis of any single brand. The gap between benchmark and diagnosis is where single-tool work lives.

GrackerAI: $99 per month for 100 weekly prompts across 3 engines plus 3 GEO-optimized articles monthly; $499 Scale moves to 200 daily prompts and 10 articles. The 7-day trial requires a card. Deepest vertical is cybersecurity. If your team already produces content, you are paying for a bundle you do not need.

Gauge charges $599 per month for 600 daily prompts across 6 platforms (108,000 answers monthly), 18 publish-ready articles, and 5 seats; 1-week trial. This is an execution bundle; treat Gauge's own per-answer cost math as marketing and check it against your trial data.

Tier 3: enterprise

Profound is the enterprise default: custom pricing, up to 9 answer engines, SSO. A free 7-day trial and self-serve plans from $99 per month exist, so you can evaluate without a sales call.

Profound raised a $180 million Series D at a $1.8 billion valuation and reports 1,000+ enterprise customers including Comcast and Walmart. Its pricing page shows a free Trial (50 prompts daily, 7 days) and custom Enterprise plans. Self-serve plans from $99 per month were announced in October 2025 (ChatGPT-only at entry); third-party comparisons put Growth near $399 per month, which we could not verify on Profound's own site (needs review). Under roughly 50 employees: run the trial, learn from it, and expect to outgrow the platform.

The exception: paying once instead of monthly

Every tool above bills monthly, and that shape does not fit every buyer. CiteScore sells a $299 one-time audit and a $1,500 six-week done-for-you Fix Sprint. Agencies such as DerivateX sell one-time diagnoses at $3,500. When you want a baseline and a fix list rather than charts, one-time wins.

CiteScore breaks the pattern at three prices: a free 20-prompt scan, a $299 one-time AI Visibility Audit (100 prompts across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity, a citation landscape, and a 90-day fix plan, delivered in about 30 minutes), and the $1,500 Fix Sprint: rewrite up to 5 priority pages, publish 4 articles, pitch 10 citation-gap sources, re-audit in week 6. A $2,500 Fix Sprint+ doubles the volume. Credit where due: CiteScore's own pages carry the warning most vendors bury, that gains take 60 to 90 days.

One honest label: the Fix Sprint is a productized service run by a team, not a human expert diagnosing your specific positioning. That matters when you compare it to the other one-time shape, an agency diagnosis like DerivateX's $3,500 engagement.

One-time fits when you need a baseline and a prioritized fix list, when you suspect one specific problem (a wrong category association, missing from comparison answers) and want it scoped, or when nobody on your team will log into a dashboard weekly. A subscription still wins for ongoing competitive monitoring, weekly leadership reporting, or multi-market coverage.

What none of the subscriptions fix

Dashboards measure; they do not fix. Hands-on reviews of the major platforms repeat one finding: data without action. And AI answers are non-deterministic, so every vendor's numbers carry noise. Whatever you buy, budget separately for the fixes: docs restructuring, comparison pages, earned media.

  • SEOs interviewed by Mike Sonders report the same three complaints about this category: per-prompt pricing adds up, prompt caps are low, and reports arrive without action recommendations (LinkedIn).
  • Discovered Labs' hands-on comparison of Profound, Peec, and Otterly concluded: "All three platforms diagnose the problem but don't fix it" (review). A thread on r/SEO_tools_reviews puts it more bluntly: "They measure visibility in AI responses, not improve it" (Reddit). The same thread describes Otterly's competitor detection classifying seven medical device manufacturers as competitors, and Peec's CPO saying results come from UI scraping rather than an API.
  • Ahrefs measured AI Overviews rewriting themselves about every 2.15 days, with 45.5% of citations turning over between consecutive responses. Any single reading, from any tool on this page, is one sample.

None of this argues against the tools above. It argues for knowing what you are buying: measurement. Fixing is a separate line item.

How to choose, in one paragraph

Free layer if you are early. Otterly.AI or Promptmonitor at $29 for cheap weekly tracking. Peec AI at $95, or Semrush and Ahrefs if you are already their customer. DevTune or GrackerAI at $99 for devtools-specific coverage. Gauge at $599 if you are buying content execution anyway. Profound if you are an enterprise. CiteScore, or a human-run diagnosis, if you want answers and a fix list without a monthly bill.

If you only want to know how AI engines currently describe your product without adding a monthly fee, a one-time Citation Gap diagnosis is the better buy. That is what CiteGap does by hand for developer tools: we run the prompts across engines, read what each engine says and cites, and hand you a prioritized fix list. Start with the free lite audit; if the gap is wide, you will know exactly what fixing it involves.

Run the free lite audit

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